Exalted: The Awakening Backgrounds
This is the list of 2nd Edition backgrounds and how they interface with the Modern world. Anything not on this list is going to be essentially useless to a character in The Awakening, and shouldn't be taken, but some which are actually excluded or irrelevant have been left in for the purpose of explaining its exclusion. Ally Ally is essentially unchanged in terms of mechanics, but the type of ally you can call upon are different. You won't be finding many - if any - Exalts with an Essence score of 5, and 4 is rare. None with Essence 6+ exist. Some Gods may be higher in Essence, but most will not be. For instance, Uncle Sam, the national deity of the United States of America, and one of the more impressive divinities of Earth, is only Essence 5 and would only require two Ally dots to have as a friend. Mortal allies may be more useful in the beginning, as any mortal worth an ally dot at all is likely to be powerful, influential, knows everyone, or rich, or some combination thereof. Mortal allies are only going to cost you one dot, too. Remember that your allies have their own goals, motivations, intimacies and such. If you have them, they don't just exist to service your needs, and may well call upon you to help with their own agenda. Quid pro quo is the order of the day. Arsenal The Arsenal background is one of those which has been excluded. If you belong to an organization (see Backing,) that grants you any kind of access to equipment at all, you'll be automatically issued with the standard gear, and will have the opportunity to requisition other things you might require or request. Artifact Artifacts are quite rare at character generation, but not absent altogether. Anything you built on your own is obviously fair game, and some small objects may have randomly survived from the Creation of old only to arrive on Earth recently; yet other artifacts still might be legendary objects from Earth's past, objects which lay dormant and mundane... Until the magic came back. If you think it belongs in Warehouse 13 (which is just fiction... As far as you know,) then it probably qualifies for player ownership with this background. Details of any Artifact background must be conferred with the ST. Backing Backing is your rank in an organization. In our modern world, this means that it's almost certainly your day-job, should you have one. Backing is a large, powerful background: a Backing rating grants you a free Resources, Followers, and Contacts background equal to one die less than your Backing background. These additional backgrounds can be bought up with bonus points of experience points in-game as if they were equal to their effective rating. Resources backgrounds granted from backing default to the minimum in each Resources bracket - if you have a backing-granted Resources 1, you certainly take home more than $1,000 a year, but you also pay out most of it in the upkeep of the other things that come with a stable life - your home payments, taxes, and so forth and so on. The $1,000 is what you have to play with free and clear. For example, suppose you have Backing 3, granting you an effective Resources rating of 2, with a take (after expenses) of $5,000 a year. You could spend one bonus point, or three experience points, raising that to Resources 3, and thus raising your take-home wages to $12,000. You must have done something really impressive to get a raise like that, or else figured out a way to keep more of your salary after expenses. Perhaps the company stock options are doing well or something. If you have Backing, then you are maintaining the pretense of living a normal life, whether it's a day-job you use as a cover for your vigilantism, the studio contract your actress is working under, your rank in a governmental organization, or even your rank in a criminal organization! However it happens, Backing is your roots, your ties to the community. It's impossible to have Backing and manage to be anonymous in the face of truly dedicated efforts to locate you... Though some careers are more anonymous than others; someone who is on Her Majesty's Secret Service is going to be a lot harder to find than an actress, for instance, and while an FBI investigator is going to be relatively hard to find, he'll be a lot easier than a career criminal; while a corporate worker will have the hardest time of all going unnoticed, and it will likely require custom Charms to that effect. See my old page for exhaustive examples of modern Backing. Command The Command background is one of those which have been excluded on the grounds that it is essentially redundant. Any body of organized armed men or women which might be represented by the Command background are effectively represented by an appropriate Followers background. Contacts Contacts are contacts, whether you're talking to Sweet Water, the alleged beggar woman who knows everyone worth knowing in Chiaroscuro, or Sammy the Squid, the plump, apparently useless and slightly-slimy-seeming guy in Newark who can put you in touch with every Italian wise guy from Maine to Maryland. Contacts are less useful for finding skilled professionals in the modern world than in Creation; in our world, a skilled professional usually advertises his services since he wants your business, and is seldom more than a single Google search away. However, Contacts are invaluable for putting you in touch with people who don't want to be accessible to the general public, such as criminals, politicians (wait, I already said criminals,) captains of industry, corporate bigwigs, members of government, and so forth and so on. Even so, being Connected has its advantages. If you come across something you need to bring to the attention of the FBI, for instance, you can just call up a hotline, or send an email, or walk in the front door of an office, but it's likely to take time as they try to figure out who you are, where you got the information you got (which may not be something you want the FBI to know,) and whether your information is credible, whereas knowing a guy who knows the guy who heads up the local field office can get your information into their hands as 'credible information from a trusted source' and left at that. Cult You actually can have the Cult background at character generation, but it usually means that your character is something like a celebrity, and your 'cult' consists of a crazy fan club. The more traditional form of Cult is of course possible, but it's going to get you on a watch-list and eyed up like you're the second coming of Charles Manson or Jim Jones, and as such is not really appropriate for a player character. Either way, your Cult rating can't start higher than 2, just like in Creation. For reference, a Cult rating of 1 would be a minor celebrity, obsessed over by a few nutso fans, or the typical Cult Commune. The Manson Family was a Cult 1. Jonestown, or the number of hardcore fans an A-list actor has would be Cult 2. Cult 3 would be Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints or Judaism worldwide; Cult 4 would be any single major branch of Christianity, Islam, or all of Buddhism or Hinduism; and Cult 5 would represent all of Christendom or Islam. Needless to say, it would be hard to get above Cult 2 without stepping on the toes of organized religion, as it would require either converting a large percentage of the population of a major region of the United States, or converting essentially everyone in a major metropolitan city to your own personal worship, and you will earn a lot of enemies if you topple Lady Liberty or the statue of Christ the Redeemer above Rio and replace it with a golden statue of yourself. (Far more enemies if you haven't actually converted the good people of Rio de Janiero or New York beforehand, of course.) Familiar Familiar as it used to be was utter crap. This is, and always has been, a simple fact; the Familiar background published in Exalted, Second Edition, was more appropriate for a Heroic Mortal than a Solar. As such, we're using BogMod's Familiar rules. Additionally, Familiars of two dots or more can speak in human speech if the player wishes it to be so. Just remember that some familiars will be much harder to travel with than others; nobody would think a cat or average dog amiss, and only an ornithologist or aviculturist would notice something odd if you had a Spix's Macaw (the rarest bird in the world, extinct in the wild,) as a familiar, while most people would just see an eccentric with a parrot pet. On the other hand, everyone will notice something amiss (and run screaming; call animal control, and so forth and so on,) if you're traveling with a polar bear or a Bengal tiger. Followers Followers are typically granted automatically as an extension of any Backing background you may have. A military officer doesn't have to pay extra for the soldiers under his command, a criminal doesn't have to pay extra for the thugs willing to perpetrate violence on his behalf, a corporate middle-manager doesn't have to pay extra for the drones and cogs that nominally work under his supervision. But, you can. Sometimes you wind up with an extra-sized unit of men at your command for some reason or another, usually because your own superiors suspect you of the crime of gross competence. Extraordinary situations, such as an experienced investigator being placed in command of a large task force for the duration of a high-profile investigation, do not call for you to buy extra Follower dots; the background represents the situation of your having an unusually large number of followers being essentially a permanent situation. You can buy dots directly onto the automatic background your Backing grants you - say you have Backing 3, which automatically grants you Followers 2. You don't need to pay for Followers 1 or 2 before you can buy Followers 3; you just buy up Followers 3 from 2. If you should lose the Backing background, you also lose the extra followers, but you get the full refund in any event. If your Followers are attached to a Backing background, you don't have to provide for their upkeep with Resources or a higher Backing; you're being placed in charge of a lot of men by the organization you work for, and they're providing the upkeep. Alternatively, you can buy Followers for another reason - these followers, independent of your Backing background, need to be up-kept with your Resources backgrounds (either you're sinking your day-job's money into them, or paying for them off investments or something,) and can be whatever you can explain yourself as having to the ST's satisfaction. Influence Influence remains essentially the same on Earth as in Creation. It is appropriate primarily for celebrities and politicians, as Influence measures how famous (or infamous) and how much your character is in the public eye. This might be a background you want to start with, or one you want to avoid like the plague, depending on your outlook and goals. A celebrity movie star might even use it as a cover by claiming that obviously any of her own deeds which might have been less-than-legal were committed by a celebrity impersonator, whereas a vigilante or assassin would most definitely want to avoid becoming famous and well-known, and might even take steps to prevent details about him or his deeds from becoming public. Manse Earth has Manses, just as Creation has them. Earthly Manses, however, are almost guaranteed to be of the accidental type; their primary value to the Chosen, at least until they start building custom Manses, is their hearthstones and Essence regeneration. On the other hand, metaphysically claiming them should be easier; one simply needs to locate a Manse, then locate its Hearthstone Room (not always so simple as it sounds) and attune to it. To figure out what is a Manse and what isn't, one simply needs to look for impressive locales and monuments, both great and small. For instance, the monument constructed around Plymouth Rock might well be a one or two-dot Water aspected Manse, whereas if one were to find a Hearthstone Room hidden high in the top of the Empire State Building, it would likely be in the range of a three-to-five dot Air aspected Manse, and if one located a hearthstone inside Lady Liberty's torch, one might even find it to be a Solar-aspected Manse! As usual with Manses, one must work with the Storyteller to develop an appropriate Manse. However, as all Manses in our world are accidental, they will be unlikely to feature many of a Manse's functions, such as deliberate powers. On the other hand, accidental powers are entirely possible, and all such structures which awoke with magic's return became extraordinarily tough and durable, just as all Manses are. Mentor Mentor is essentially unchanged. Blind Master Lee is Blind Master Lee, whether he's from Lookshy or Beijing. Past Life This background functions essentially the same as the Past Life background from Manual of Exalted Power: Infernals. You have it better in some ways than a Green Sun Prince, however, as a Solar past life becoming emergent will be less likely to try to actively fuck you over if you're another Solar, but they're likely to be very bewildered and confused by our modern world. This could range from relatively harmless instincts, like bragging about things you never did, to things which make you look a little stupid (such as placing odd demands upon members of the public, or referring to mortals as such,) to dangerous, such as attempting to force you into murder-mode in response to a slight that would wash unnoticed over someone from our day. A high Dodge MDV is a good means of mitigating the risk of this, naturally. As with the Infernal background, you need to come up with the Solar who was your former incarnation. This could well be the Solar who held your Shard at the time of the usurpation, or it might be the Solar who had your Shard at the time of the unspecified cataclysm which resulted in the magic being free to emerge on Earth. Resources Most people on Earth get their Resources rating from their employment; and hence, as part of their Backing rating. Resources on its own, however, is money you don't have to work for. You can buy multiple Resources backgrounds, or add on to existing Resources backgrounds. However, using Resources directly to purchase goods is done away with; the notion in Exalted, that a single suit of Superheavy Plate will cost a Guild Factor one-fifth of his total fortune, is as ludicrous as the notion from d20 Modern that purchasing a $300 Glock handgun will cost Bill Gates 15 million dollars. Instead, we're doing things the hard way; with cold, hard figures, represented by (and drawn from) your Resources background; the exact nature of which varies as much as it does in Creation. Some dots of Resources may give out a fixed value, such as your character's salary or wages, or money he has coming in from an annuity or settlement, but others offer you risks and rewards in the form of potential loss or gain; we call these investments. When you begin the game, you begin with the average value of a year's worth of your Resources, regardless of whether it's an investment or a salary. Afterward, if you have an investment and not a fixed income such as salary, you roll a number of dice equal to your Resources rating. Rolling no successes will get you precisely half of your Resource background's total worth, full successes will get you all of it, and successes between them will get you a proportional value. A botch costs you a dot of your Resource background (your investments tanked,) whereas if you roll more successes than you have dots in the background, your investments paid off big time and you double the amount of money you're making, adding a new dot if your total potential brings you into a higher resources bracket. :ø''': You do not have the Resources background. If you're not holding down a crap starvation-wage day-job, you're outright destitute, living off the streets or the land - your total income is ~ $500 a year. This is what those with ratings of naught and one-die ratings in Backing take home - this is their discretionary income, and that's being seriously generous. If you start without Backing or Resources anything, this is what you get to equip yourself with. :•: You have some investments or ventures, or a low-paying job. Your take of cleared cash is between $1,000 and $5,000 a year. Failing the roll but not botching gets you 1/2 of your dot's worth as determined by the ST. ($500 if you have a piddling investment, $2,500 if you're on the upper bleeding edge of 1-dot worth.) Players who start with Resources 1, either through having Backing 2 or just having Resources 1, begin play with $2,500 to spend on things and stuff. :••Doing better. Your take is between $5,000 and $12,000 anually. Failing the roll gets you 1/2 of your die's value, one success gets you 2/3rds, and two successes gets you all of it. Starting with this gives you a starting sum of $5,000 to work with. :••• This is the level at which you could maybe live off your investments full-time without having to work at all. You get $12,000 to $50,000 anually. By now you know the drill: Failure gets you 1/2 of your total, one success gets you 2/3rds, two successes gets you 5/6ths, and three gets you the whole enchilada. Starting with Resources 3 gets you $25,000 to spend on gear. :•••• Big leauges. You pull down between $50,000 and a quarter of a million ($250,000) annually. Failure gets you 1/2 of your whole value, one success gets you 5/8ths, two gets you 3/4ths, three gets you 7/8ths, and four gets you the big kahoona. Starting with Resources 4 gives you $125,000 to spend prior to the start of the game. :••••• You're '''wealthy. Your investment is major, between a quarter of a million dollars and sixteen million ($16,000,000) dollars annually. By now you know the drill: Failing the roll entirely gets you half, one success gets you 3/5th, two gets you 7/10ths, three gets you 4/5ths, four gets you 9/10ths, and five successes is the money-shot. If you score more successes at this level than dice, double your current value's worth up to the maximum, at which point you split off an additional five-dot background earning an extra flat million. At this point, do you even care? If you started with Resources 5, you get to start with $8,000,000, even if your annual is worth far less. What about big cash rewards? If you get a big cash lump sum for doing something - starring in a movie, defrauding a lottery (or actually winning one honestly,) ripping off two suitcases full of diamonds from a DeBeers vault, stealing a gangsta roll of Benjamins from a drug-pusher or whatever, you don't add dots of the Resources background, you just get the cold, hard cash. It might be wise to invest that money in a recurring Resources investment, but you don't have to. It's not like the Exalted have a hard time scaring up some funding when they want it. Investments? If you invest cash in some kind of venture or something, you get a Resources background with a total value of the money you invested therein, and a commensurate number of dots. If you invested ten grand, for instance, you would get a two-dot Resources background. When it came time to roll for your money, you would roll two dice - coming back with a failure would render five grand unto you, coming back with one success would win you $7,500, two successes would get you your full $10,000. Botching the roll would halve your total value - you'd get $5,000, dropping you to the breaking point between two dice and one die, but keeping two dice for next time. Rolling more successes than dice would render unto you twice the value of your original investment - $20,000, and that would become your new top value, pushing your Resources background into a three-die background. So, can I sell my investments? Absolutely. If you need cash now and you have money invested, you can liquidate your stocks for 75% of your maximum value. Supposing you had $20,000 in Resources and needed to liquidate all of it. You'd get $15,000 immediately. You could also liquidate only some of your total value, getting back 75% of what you liquidated. If you wanted to liquidate your $20,000 down to the minimum level to hold down a three-dice value ($12,000), you could liquidate $8,000 worth of your value, receiving $6,000 in cold, hard cash. What if I need money sooner, but don't want to sell? You can run your investments as 'high-risk, high-reward,' by rolling them quarterly. Divide your total value by 4 and roll your full dice every three months against that quartered value. If you win big, you get to double the quartered value - adding 25% of your maximum onto your maximum, but if you botch, you lose half of the whole value, and get bubkis for that quarter. Investments are scary. Can I have other forms of Resources? Absolutely! If you desire some stability in your life, you can get less risky forms of Resources, though they won't ever pay out as well as rolling the dice and taking your chances do. If you want a safe investment, you can move your money from stocks to high-volume bank accounts, getting an annual interest rate of somewhere between 1.5% and 10%, depending on how much money you have with them. Your money is safe of everything short of your bank collapsing, and if you want to be really careful, you can make sure to keep the amount of money you have with any individual bank at or below $250,000, siphoning off the interest into new accounts at new banks or other ventures, thus ensuring that your money is protected by the FDIC. Needless to say, this is very low-reward, but also very low-risk. Other forms of 'safe' Resources you might have, which are far better than those available to Joe Everyman, would be along the lines of getting a no-show job on a corporate payroll in exchange for some kind of favor to the company; you draw a salary and get the benefits of an employee, but your job description amounts to having lunch with and golfing with someone high in the company once in a while. These are great compliments to an 'Ally' background. Use your imagination. Savant The Savant background represents educated lore of the First Age. As this is in fact, not even the Second Age and it's uncertain how our modern world exactly relates to Creation, this background essentially doesn't exist. Perhaps you're thinking about Past Lives? Category:Exalted: The Awakening